EU justice commissioner hits back at Google on "right to be forgotten"

Martine Reicherts, Europe's caretaker commissioner for justice has hit back at suggestions from tech companies including Google that the "right to be forgotten" has encouraged freedom of expression to be violated.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, branded the right to be forgotten as "deeply immoral" and a dangerous step towards the "sanitisation of human knowledge," earlier this month.

"A sober analysis of the ruling shows that it does in fact not elevate the right to be forgotten to a 'super right' trumping other fundamental rights, such as the freedom of expression. This ruling does not give the all-clear for people or organisations to have content removed from the web simply because they find it inconvenient," said Reicherts.

She said each case will have to be assessed on its own merits, and that a variety of factors about the information in question would have to be considered, including its sensitivity for the individual's private life, and the interest of the public having access to that information.

The EU's data protection committee, also criticised Google back in July, for the way they were handling the "right to be forgotten" ruling, as it was reported Google were only removing links from European sites, meaning that all the vivid details were still available on Google.com.

The "right to be forgotten" debacle began in May 2014, when a Spanish man googled his name and noticed search results brought up newspaper articles about the reposition of his house in the 1990s. He argued that the results were "irrelevant" old news, and the links should be removed as they infringed his privacy rights, the EU court agreed, and by the end of the month Google had launched its "right to be forgotten" form.